The Squirrel-Cage

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, “You’re a wonder, young man!” and said instead, “Well, let’s hear the news.”

Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time during the ready, spirited narrative of the young “captain in the army of electricity,” as he had once called himself, Lydia’s father felt a qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though she were breathless from some exertion, and a deep flush stained her cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her father’s eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge, moved by the oblique, harassing intimations he had been forced to hear from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that was in his daughter’s mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests—an apprehension, like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia “safely married.” Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could, somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps if some one had not ignored with him—

“I should have been back ten days ago,” Paul drew to the end of his story, “but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since I’ve adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector’s work, we’ve been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from the accident, what might have happened.”

“By the Lord!” cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by the story of danger the other had been relating, “I should think it would turn your hair white every time a dynamo’s installed. How did you feel when the fly-wheel broke?”

“The fly-wheel isn’t on the dynamo, of course,” corrected Paul, “so I don’t feel responsible for it in a business way, and that’s everything. As for being frightened, why, it’s all over so quickly. You don’t have time to take in what’s happening. You’re there or you’re not. And if you are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs,” he added, with a simple, manly depreciation of his courage. “You mustn’t think it often happens, you know; it’s supposed never to.”

He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the wires. At no time did Lydia’s suitor show to better advantage than in speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden prizes of the profession.

This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia’s cheeks. “I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the ‘army’ of electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody’s death, and with us it’s simply a question of who’s got the most to give. He gets the most back—and that’s all there is to it. The company’s bound to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two ordinary men’s work, you get two men’s pay. See? There’s no limit to the application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say he’ll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn’t believe it. But you can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to concentrate—not to lose a detail—to put every ounce of your force into it—that’s the thing.”

He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were a loosened bowstring beside this twanging, taut intensity. He felt slightly dismayed to have his unspoken principles carried to this nth power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions, hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled certain remarks of Dr. Melton’s.

The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. “I mustn’t keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose,” he said; but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. “You and I will have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won’t we? I’ve been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every single ball this winter, and I think I’m heroic not to insist on more—but her first season—!”

Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, “But suppose you’re out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and your three dances come along?”